If you work as a sole trader cleaner and you bring someone in to help, the answer turns on one question: is that person an employee? Under the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969 you must hold employers' liability insurance of at least £5 million if you employ anyone, and that duty applies to sole traders exactly as it applies to limited companies. Part-time, casual, temporary and paid-in-cash all count. The Health and Safety Executive can fine a business up to £2,500 for each day it trades without suitable cover.
There is one exemption that matters a great deal to small cleaning rounds. If your business is not a limited company and every person you employ is a close family member, you are not legally required to buy employers' liability insurance. A window cleaner trading as a sole trader whose only helper is their spouse or their own son sits inside that exemption. The moment a non-relative joins, or the business is incorporated, the exemption falls away.
Being exempt from the legal duty is not the same as being protected. Your husband, wife or adult child can still bring a claim against you if they are injured through your negligence, and without employers' liability cover that claim lands on your personal finances. This guide sets out who counts as an employee in cleaning work, how the family exemption really works, what public liability will and will not do for an injured helper, and the practical steps to take before your next big job.
When does a helper trigger the legal duty to buy employers' liability?
The test is employment, not paperwork. You can have no written contract, no PAYE scheme and no fixed hours, and the person helping you can still be an employee for insurance purposes. The Health and Safety Executive points to a set of practical indicators, and the more of them that apply, the more likely it is that you need employers' liability insurance for cleaners.
- You deduct income tax and National Insurance from what you pay them.
- You decide what work they do, when they do it and how.
- You supply the vacuum, the pole system, the chemicals and the van.
- You can tell them not to come back, and they cannot send someone else in their place.
- They work only for you, or almost only for you.
- You pay them holiday pay or sick pay.
A friend who turns up for three Saturdays to help you clear a big end of tenancy backlog, using your machines, doing what you tell them, paid in cash once the job is finished, is far closer to an employee than to a business in their own right. The informal arrangement does not remove the duty. It just means nobody has written it down.
Length of engagement makes no difference either. There is no minimum period before the Act bites. A single afternoon's help is enough, which surprises many cleaners who assume there is a grace period for short-term work.
How does the family member exemption actually work?
The exemption applies to businesses that are not incorporated, so sole traders and ordinary partnerships, where all of the employees are closely related to the employer. The relationships that count are specific: husband, wife, civil partner, father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, stepfather, stepmother, son, daughter, grandson, granddaughter, stepson, stepdaughter, brother, sister, half-brother and half-sister.
Notice who is missing from that list. Nephews, nieces, cousins, uncles, aunts, parents-in-law, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law are not included. Neither is an unmarried partner who is not a civil partner. A domestic cleaner who takes her niece out on the round two days a week is employing a non-exempt person, and the legal duty applies in full.
Two further traps catch people out. First, the exemption is lost for everyone as soon as you employ one person who is not closely related. You cannot insure the outsider and leave your spouse uninsured. Second, limited companies are outside the exemption completely. If you incorporated your cleaning business and your wife is on the books as an employee, you need employers' liability insurance even though she is family. Many sole traders who later form a company forget this point entirely.
| Situation | Employers' liability legally required? | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Sole trader, spouse helps two mornings a week, no other staff | Generally no, the close family exemption applies | Your spouse can still sue you in negligence, and the cost falls on you personally |
| Limited company, director's son employed part-time | Yes | The family exemption does not extend to incorporated businesses |
| Sole trader, friend helps occasionally for cash using your kit | Almost certainly yes | Informality does not change the test, and HSE can fine per day |
| Sole trader, niece or nephew helps regularly | Yes | Nieces and nephews are not on the closely related list |
| Genuinely self-employed cleaner with own clients, kit and public liability | Often no, but it depends on the facts | Labour-only arrangements are usually treated as employment by insurers |
| Student on work experience with you | Treat as an employee | HSE guidance expects work experience placements to be covered |
| Temp supplied by an agency | Depends on the agreement | Get written confirmation of who carries the employers' liability |
Will public liability cover a helper who is injured?
No, and this is the single most expensive misunderstanding in small cleaning businesses. Public liability responds to injury or damage suffered by third parties: your client, a tenant, a passer-by, a visitor to the office you clean. Policies carry a specific exclusion for injury to your own employees, because that is the territory of employers' liability. The two covers sit side by side and do different jobs, which we set out in more detail in our guide on public liability versus employers' liability.
Picture a Saturday deep clean of a four-bedroom house. Your helper carries a loaded carpet machine down a steep staircase, slips on a wet tread and lands badly, breaking a wrist and taking four months off their other job. If that person is legally your employee, a solicitor will look at whether you provided proper training, whether the machine was suitable, whether you assessed the manual handling risk. Your public liability cover will not answer the claim. Without employers' liability, the damages, the legal costs and any care or loss of earnings award come out of your own pocket. Our guide to the true cost of a cleaning claim shows how quickly the surrounding costs outgrow the headline injury.
Subcontractor or employee? The question insurers really ask
Plenty of cleaning businesses pass work to other cleaners and call them subcontractors. Insurers draw a line between two types. A bona fide subcontractor runs their own business, has their own clients, brings their own equipment and materials, and holds their own public liability policy. A labour-only subcontractor turns up and works under your direction with your kit, and for insurance purposes is usually rated as if they were an employee.
If you use labour-only help, your employers' liability policy needs to reflect it and your wages declaration should include what you pay them. Describing a labour-only helper as a self-employed contractor to keep the premium down is a false economy, because the insurer will look at the true working arrangement when a claim comes in. We cover the distinction in detail in our guide to labour-only subcontractors and your cleaning insurance.
Ask any genuine subcontractor for a copy of their public liability certificate before they start, check the limit of indemnity (the maximum the insurer will pay for a claim) and diarise the renewal date. If their cover lapses halfway through a contract and something goes wrong, the injured party will come looking for the business that arranged the work.
Exempt but exposed: why family cleaners often buy cover anyway
The exemption removes a legal requirement. It does not remove the risk. Three things tend to push family cleaning businesses towards buying employers' liability even when they do not have to.
Liability is the first. If your brother falls from a ladder while helping you on a conservatory roof and you did not provide the right access equipment or training, he has a claim in negligence like anyone else. Family relationships survive many things, but a life-changing injury with no insurance behind it is a hard test. Ladder and access risks are explored further in our guide on working at height for window cleaners.
Contracts are the second. Letting agents, managing agents, schools, surgeries and facilities managers routinely ask for an employers' liability certificate as part of their onboarding or tender pack, and some will not accept a business without one even where the exemption applies. Explaining the exemption to a procurement portal rarely ends well. Holding the certificate is usually quicker than arguing.
Growth is the third. Cleaning rounds rarely stay the same size. The day you take on your first non-relative, or the day you incorporate, the duty starts immediately. Having cover already arranged removes the risk of trading uninsured for a few weeks while you sort it out.
If you are weighing it up, an enquiry through our employers' liability insurance enquiry form takes a few minutes and lets you see the cost alongside your liability cover before deciding.
What insurers ask a sole trader with casual help
Employers' liability is rated mainly on your trade, your wage roll and the type of premises you work in. For a one-person cleaning business with occasional help, expect questions along these lines:
- Your estimated annual wages or payments to employees, labour-only subcontractors and casual helpers, separated out.
- The cleaning disciplines you carry out, for example domestic, office, end of tenancy, carpet, pressure washing or specialist work.
- Whether anyone works at height, and if so by what method, including ladders, poles or towers.
- Whether you use hazardous chemicals and how you manage them under COSHH. Our plain-English COSHH guide explains what records inspectors look for.
- Any work on construction sites, in industrial premises or with heat, which can change the rating.
- Claims and injuries in the last five years, including incidents where no claim was made.
Answer these fully and accurately. Commercial insurance buyers have a duty of fair presentation under the Insurance Act 2015, meaning you must disclose every material fact a prudent insurer would want to know, or make a disclosure clear enough for the insurer to ask questions. Understating your wage roll or leaving out high-level work can reduce a claim payment or void the policy. Our guide to fair presentation of risk for cleaning businesses covers how to get this right.
Premiums vary with wages, trade mix and claims history, so any figure quoted in isolation is meaningless. What is generally true is that adding employers' liability to an existing public liability policy tends to cost less than buying it as a standalone product, because the insurer is already rating the business. At Polished Insurance our questionnaire asks only the questions that apply to cleaning work, so you are not wading through forms written for builders or hauliers.
Displaying the certificate and keeping records
Once you hold employers' liability insurance you must make the certificate available to your employees. Displaying it electronically is acceptable, provided staff know where to find it and can access it. HSE inspectors can ask to see it, and failing to display the certificate or refusing to produce it on request carries a fine of up to £1,000.
Keep old certificates. Some injury and disease claims, particularly those involving dermatitis or respiratory problems from cleaning chemicals, surface years after the exposure. If you cannot identify who insured you at the time, tracing cover becomes difficult. A dated folder on your phone or cloud drive is enough, and it costs nothing. The HSE's employers' liability guidance and the text of the 1969 Act are both worth a skim if you want the primary source.
Checklist: working out whether you need cover for your helper
- Write down exactly who helps you, how often, what they are paid and whose equipment they use.
- Check the relationship. Is every helper on the closely related list, and is your business unincorporated? If yes to both, the legal duty probably does not apply. If no to either, it does.
- Apply the employee tests. If you control the work, supply the kit and could dismiss them, treat them as an employee regardless of what you call them.
- Collect certificates from anyone you genuinely treat as a self-employed subcontractor, and check the limit and expiry date.
- Look at your contracts. Search your client agreements and tender documents for the words employers' liability and note the limits they require.
- Check your PAYE and pension position at the same time, since paying a regular helper can bring payroll and auto-enrolment duties with it. Guidance is on gov.uk.
- Estimate your annual payments to helpers so you can give an accurate wages figure at quote stage.
- Review training and equipment. Manual handling, ladder use, chemical dilution and lone working are the areas most often picked apart after an employee injury.
- Diarise a review for the point at which you take on a non-relative or incorporate, and arrange cover before that person's first shift.
Matching the cover to the cleaning you actually do
Employers' liability rarely stands alone. Most cleaning businesses hold it alongside public liability, and often add cover for tools, equipment and client keys. The right combination depends on the work: a sole trader with a domestic round has a different risk profile from someone doing builders cleans or pressure washing driveways.
Houses and flats bring breakage and key risks, which is why domestic cleaners insurance usually pairs liability cover with protection for damage to a client's belongings. Teams doing property turnarounds should look at end of tenancy cleaning insurance, where several people often work in one property on a tight deadline. Machine-heavy trades should also consider tools and equipment cover, since a stolen extraction machine stops the work as effectively as any injury. For a broader view of how employee cover works once you have a payroll, our guide to employers' liability for cleaning companies goes further into limits, wage declarations and subcontractors.
Getting cover arranged
If you are a sole trader with a helper, the mistake to avoid is assuming the arrangement is too casual to matter. Check the relationship, check the control test, and get cover in place before the next shift rather than after an accident. Where you are exempt, make a deliberate decision rather than drifting into being uninsured by default.
Tell us what you clean, who helps you and roughly what you pay them, and we will approach insurers that understand cleaning work. Start with our employers' liability quote enquiry, or browse the full range of cleaning insurance covers if you want liability, equipment and key cover quoted together. This guide is general information rather than personal advice, and what any policy covers depends on the wording, the insurer and your circumstances, so speak to a broker about your own situation.